


enough to go by

by strikinglight



Category: Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
Genre: F/M, Flashbacks, Post-Canon, Rain, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-27
Updated: 2018-11-27
Packaged: 2019-08-28 22:44:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16732056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: Outside the rain is quieting, and she knows the stars will come out whether or not she can see them, and that will have to be enough.In which Tana searches, and finds, and learns to make do in the time and the places between.





	enough to go by

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pomme (manta)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/manta/gifts).



> This is a birthday fic for my dearest Winnybean, who has been so good about the fact that I’ve been loudly threatening to kill her on this specific day and at this specific time all month, and is just so good in general, about so many things and in so many ways. Happy birthday, best Winny! I hope this little offering gives you even a fraction of the joy that you have brought me over the course of our friendship—which is to say I hope it kills you as hard as I promised it would, hehe. I love you very much and I bless the day that you were born every day. <3
> 
> [Title and epigraph and song to loop while reading, if you feel so inclined.](https://youtu.be/rVw8oWrHKEQ)

_I’m at your back door  
with the earth _ _of a hundred nations in my skin._

_\- Vienna Teng, “Enough to Go By”_

 

 

When she’s lucky, she makes it under some kind of roof before the rain hits.

Before Tana left home, Syrene made her a map—sure, generous strokes looping across a fresh sheet of parchment, spelling out the names of towns and inns and villages with all the certitude of someone who had traveled the world’s skies. It was, Tana had thought then as she opened her hands to receive it, just the sort of gift someone like Syrene might give, knowing full well that she could no more tell Tana where to find what she was looking for than she could accompany her on the journey. At the very least, Syrene could show her places where she might find rest as she searched, and that was no small thing. 

Tana knows that is no small thing, now, having been away a full moon. Syrene may not be with her, but her hand has shown Tana the way ahead, and her name has helped secure a room for Tana for the next sennight at least. Now she writes with a borrowed quill to say as much, her own hand less certain of its path across the page—a little spidering, a little crooked as it’s been since she was a girl—but no less eager, no less determined for all that.

 

> You’ll be happy to know I made it to the inn you recommended. The innkeep sends you her affection and is glad to know you are in good health since the end of the war. The spring storms have begun to blow in off the Western sea and Achaeus is unhappy about all the wet, as well as about having to be put up in a stall for the meantime, but we are safe. 

 

Outside the rain has started up in earnest, but for now there is enough between her and it that she can appreciate the soft drumming it makes on the eaves overhead. In counterpoint she can hear voices just outside the door, footsteps coming and going, a harper tuning in the dining hall downstairs. It’s an organic sort of music, wonderful for its ordinariness, and Tana loves it instantly. 

 

> I don’t know much yet about where I should be heading—I’ve found no one who’s met him so far as I’ve gone, just a whisper here and there, people who remember his name—but I mean to keep asking and I trust I’ll find something soon.

 

The dinner bell sounds from the stairway, and Tana’s stomach grumbles softly, as if in protest at being kept waiting even this much longer. She ignores it, continues to write. It’s just the closing left to do now, and she’s not the kind to dishonor a task by leaving it unfinished—or at least, not a task that matters, anyway.

 

> Please rest assured I’m taking care of myself, as ever; I would love it if you could tell my father and brother as much when next you see them. Be well. I embrace you all.

 

After she signs her name, she seals the letter. Outside the rain is quieting, and she knows the stars will come out whether or not she can see them, and that will have to be enough. She’ll take what hope they have to offer where she can. She’s learned much since she first left home on her own, about how to make the most of what she has.

A second bell. Another little grumble in the pit of her stomach that won’t be so easily brushed aside. Smiling, Tana rises, shakes out her long hair, and moves to descend the stairs.

 

* * *

 

“You really are an odd bird.” 

Tana rests her chin in her hands, casting her gaze sweetly across the little corner table to where Cormag sits brooding over his tankard of ale. “Pray tell, how so?”

Cormag has a stormy air about him, his arms crossed, his brow drawn down into deep furrows. She’s seen some of the other men balk as they approach him for fear of drawing his anger, and knowing that by and large it’s nothing more than the natural set of his face makes her laugh softly to herself. Cormag would as soon glower this way at a run in the hem of his tunic as he would a potential foe he was facing down on the other end of his lance, and call her overconfident perhaps but Tana has always been certain there’s nothing at all for her to fear in his company.

“Well, look at you,” he mutters, as if it explains everything. Tana needs to strain to hear him over the raucous singing that fills the tavern floor to rafters. “Hanging about with us rowdy men, all of us deep in our cups. I thought a princess like yourself would enjoy more refined company than this.”

He faces her straight on when they speak to one another, like an equal, with none of the bowed heads or lowered gazes that others might say befit a knight in the presence of a princess. In turn she makes it a point to meet his gaze—to hold it readily, even gratefully. “You know this princess, though. That should have been enough to teach you otherwise.”

A shrug is all the answer she receives. “Fair point.”

Tana hums, thoughtful. She’d studied music in the castle as a girl—the refined sort that he was talking about, probably, ceremonial hymns and old ballads on the harp and the flute—and found it nothing short of maddening. Unmusical Tana, her fingers always too clumsy, her voice always too loud. 

Eirika’s army has all but commandeered the tavern, every one of the long tables so full the men sit practically shoulder to shoulder, the local folk more than happy to make way for those who’d bought their freedom so dearly that day. Now the room is full of noise—good noise, singing and shouting and laughter that all but drown out the harper’s strains, the kind of noise that tells you anything you hear is all right, even if it’s out of tune or too loud or not pretty enough for a castle hall, and for a moment Tana can imagine, can almost hear what peace will sound like when it finally comes. 

“Do you sing, Cormag?”

“What? No.” He looks affronted by the very idea, but then his face colors and his expression relaxes into something closer to sheepish instead. “I never learned how to do it proper.”

Bashfulness is a funny look on him, Tana thinks. If she weren’t such a kind friend, she’d be looking for ways to prod it out of him more often.

“I never said anything about proper.” She grins, and to prove a point bangs her own near-empty tankard against the tabletop so hard more than a few sets of eyes widen at the next tables over. “Hey, harper, let’s have ‘The Wild Rover!’”

Proper or not, it’s never not a good time for a song, even with a war on. Perhaps especially with a war on. It’s a good time solely for the way Cormag smiles even though he doesn’t sing along, the way he almost laughs as he quips that her caterwauling will bring rain to the desert.

 

* * *

 

On days that she is not so lucky, the storm clouds catch her flying and between towns, and she and Achaeus have to make a break for the closest shelter they can find—a stand of trees or a rocky overhang, anything to shade their heads until the skies clear. She’s quicker now than she used to be, more sensitive to the smell of rain in the air. Sometimes they even make it to cover before the first drop falls, and that feels like its own small victory, silly as it may sound. 

Silly as it may sound, she’s proud of the things she knows how to do now, with a knighthood under her belt, a real war—how to pitch a tent, to start a fire, to get her bearings by the stars. How to survive, even when she finds herself all on her own. The forests of Magvel are dark and deep, but the trees keep her head dry, and after what she has seen Tana has no fear of forests anymore, no fear of the dark.

 Not to say, of course, that she doesn’t know to be wary. She has learned wariness too, as every soldier must, but also how to place her faith in the weight of a lance in her hand and in the way Achaeus surges beneath her to carry her into the sky. Achaeus’ sides are scored now with arrow scars to mark how far they’ve come together, and after having looked a demon in the face Tana can feel, bone-deep, what her fear is worth—and what she’ll risk, despite.

Some unlucky days, Tana takes her chances with the forests. Other days, though—mount and heart permitting—she flies through the rain, laughing as the water streams into her hair and down her face, and that too is its own victory.

 

* * *

 

Day’s end finds Tana tending to Achaeus on the cliff just outside the encampment, working out the knots in his mane with a steel comb, as Cormag watches her with his arms folded.

“You do an awful lot to look after that beast.”

“It’s not a lot at all,” she protests, frowning as she worries at an especially stubborn tangle. “In the evenings I rub him down and check his wings and feet, and I give him an all-over grooming every sennight. I clean all his tack daily, too.”

Cormag inclines his head. “And you take care of all that yourself?”

“Of course, no one else will.” The knot comes free, and she pauses to smooth down the hair with her fingers before continuing with her work. The other girls had hated maintenance work, back in Tana’s training days, but caring for her pegasus had been her favorite thing, and still is. “It’s how I was trained. Don’t you need to do things like this too, for that mount of yours? Keep him clean, and all that?”

For a moment Cormag looks disgruntled again—or perhaps bewildered, or thoughtful, all tight mouth and wrinkled brow. It’s many things at once when he looks at her this way, always as though he’s parsing the words of another language, always as though figuring her out takes work.

Then he jerks his chin toward the edge of the cliff, gesturing down at the desert like it’s going to answer all her questions. “As far as staying clean goes, Princess, he takes care of himself. Listen.”

Tana listens, hears—a wave of shrill, distant shrieking, and beneath that the rasping susurrus of a body hitting the dunes again and again, persistent as the tides coming in for all they’re nowhere near the ocean. She needs only crane her head a little to peer over the edge of the cliff and see what it is, Genarog diving and rolling, throwing up the sand in great clouds and turning the air all around him a dusty gold in the dusk.

All told, there’s something beautiful about it, even if Tana’s always hated the thought of the desert, and hated the reality of it even more so after having had to march with an army through it. The sand is terrible for how hot it gets under the noon sun, how it stings the skin when the wind kicks it up, how it drags at the legs and feet until walking through it feels like death itself. The place feels all around like death itself; at least it had, before Genarog’s joy, or something that looked enough like joy that it seemed like the most natural thing in the world for her to understand it as such.

“He’s amazing,” murmurs Tana, because when faced with a wondrous thing she can’t say anything other than the truth. “And you’re amazing for having tamed him.”

The last thing she expects is for Cormag to laugh, loudly from the chest, and the sound comes out of him so easily she’s immediately disarmed. In that moment they suit each other more perfectly even than when they fly together into battle, this wyvern of Grado and this man who walks and speaks like he’s cut from the very stones of its cliffs, both seized by a joy that springs contrary to all imagining from the harshest of places.

“Grains of sand, men like me are,” he says. Then, with a light hand, he cuffs her shoulder. “But you’re plenty amazing yourself.”

 

* * *

 

It starts to rain again as Tana packs up in her room at the last inn.

Her saddlebags are only a little heavier than they were when she first set out, for all she’s been given much—a new cloak lined with fleece to replace an old one gone all worn and threadbare, a clean blanket, a new shaft for her lance from the blacksmith in town. Not two days ago she had complimented the fine, dark grain of the wood, the heft and balance of it in her hand, and he had told her with some wryness that he was hardly deserving of her praise, seeing as he made a practice of buying all his spear shafts off the young carpenter who lived up in the hills outside of town. The place was a bit of a trek, he’d said, and the man dealt mostly in houses and furniture these days, but now and again if one offered food and a kind word he might be persuaded to help them make a weapon or two.

At the time Tana had nodded and smiled and kept her own counsel, even if in her heart of hearts she had thought, _How like him._ The hills and forests around Carcino are all strange to her now—she must have been a green recruit when she saw them last, marching through after having thrown her lot in with Eirika all that long time ago—but she’s not afraid. She’s always known what she’s looking for, and now her eyes are on it, rain or no rain.

There’s a letter drying on the desk that she picks up and peruses one last time; this is the last thing that needs attending to, delayed because it’s precious, all the more precious because it’s become rare. She’s begun to write home less frequently lately as her path has grown warm and then warmer, just because it’s been difficult to look anywhere but directly ahead. But she knows looking behind matters just as much, so she’s taking this chance to send one now that she can.

 

> My very dear Syrene, here’s hoping that by the time you read this, I’ll be flying home.

 

She doesn’t say _we_ , as she doesn’t think Cormag would appreciate her trying to make his choices for him. But she’s nothing if not a hopeful girl, and she can’t help thinking it must not be so unreasonable to want this—this one little wish granted, in exchange for all the hope she’s made it her duty to keep believing in, all this time.

Tana folds the letter, tucks it into the pocket of her skirt to give to the rider before she departs. There’s an amulet in that pocket that she withdraws now—a delicately carved feather made of burnished wood, swinging on the end of its leather cord as she slips it over her head.

 

* * *

 

“What will you do when the war is over?”

Cormag, whittling away at a piece of wood next to the firepit, doesn’t look up. It’s late now, and the flames are burning low, and at this hour she’s aware he usually wants to be alone. But he doesn’t tell her to go away either; as far as Tana is concerned that’s enough permission to stay.

“If this is about your offer again, I already told you—”

“And I already promised you I wouldn’t press, didn’t I?”she says, gentle and diplomatic but no less firm, cutting him off before he can refuse her again. It had stung a little the first time to hear him say no to Frelia, to a place at her side, even if she’d understood the reasons. “I’m just curious. Is it so terrible to want to know what will become of a friend after we all part ways?”

Cormag stops his work a moment to regard her steadily, the same as always, and yet there are certain things she’s realizing she’s only just now seeing clearly—how tired his eyes look, the haunted cast of his face half-shadowed by the flickering fire.

“Return to Grado, perhaps, for a time. Help rebuild my homeland. And after that I’ll disappear. Open a woodshop, do things for the living for once.” He shrugs and drops his gaze again, like it’s all the same to him, though she knows it’s anything but. His hands keep steady in their whittling, undeterred by the conversation. “Does that seem like such a bad life to you?”

Tana watches him for a while, turning her answer over, wondering what would be prudent to say. In the end, she decides—as always—to be truthful. “It seems like a life.”

“A life is all that men like me deserve,” he tells her. Then, softening, possibly offering a truth of his own in exchange for hers, “But I will always be your friend, Princess Tana.”

He throws her the thing he’s been carving before she can answer, and it’s lucky her hands know to move quicker than her mind when it matters, palms opening to make a cup into which the wooden feather falls. She takes it between two fingers, turning it in the light, marveling at how the wood’s been sanded smooth, at the wispy barbs so delicately carved they look almost like they might blow in the wind.

Tana may not let on, but she remembers all the things Cormag tells her about what he wants or does not want, when they fly far afield to scout together. Sometimes on nights they take the late watch and the torches cast their warm but fractured glow on the planes of his face, he’ll even say a little about the ghosts that follow him through his days, watching, always watching. She thinks about the many things he knows how to do with his hands, how he can just as easily carve animals out of wood as he can hurl a javelin straight through an enemy’s heart, how much work he must sink into each task he imagines is worth doing. She thinks about the way his voice goes quiet when he talks about no longer belonging anywhere, and how she can tell there must be something that even now he’s working to keep from her, some wish he doesn’t want her to try to grant just because they call each other friend.

Cormag is a friend. It’s precisely because of this that, for now at least, she’ll hold her peace, and ask more reasonable things of him instead. “May a friend sit by the fire with her friend awhile?”

He does smile then, and however briefly she can see past the shadows on his face. “A friend can and will do whatever she likes.”

 

* * *

 

“‘But now I’m returning with gold in great store, and I never will play the wild rover no more.’”

She’s singing while she flies, not loudly, only to keep pace with her racing heart as she follows the treeline. This forest is not so dense, not so dark as others she’s flown over on this journey—the leaves a brighter green, the shadows more dappled with light, but maybe that’s just how it seems, now she can see where to go, now she knows that at the next break in the trees she’ll come to clearing, and there find a cottage with a smoking chimney and a cairn of stones beside it.

It had begun to rain gently when she took to the air, but she can hardly feel it now as anything more than a coolness on her face, on the backs of her hands. Achaeus flexes his wings, bracing for the descent, and the drops fly off in a sparkling shower.

“‘And it’s no, nay, never—no, nay, never, no more. And I’ll play the wild rover, no, never, no more.’”

The song ends when they land. She’s sure whoever’s inside can hear, if not her voice, the thudding of hooves, drumming into the otherwise unbroken silence. With a kiss on the nose and a whisper of thanks she turns Achaeus out into the grass to graze and marches up to the door alone, fist already raised to knock.

She’s half-anticipating it when he swings the door open before she can. In less than a heartbeat she’s thinking, _How like you,_ even if she doesn’t say it, even if all she can do is look at him. _How like you indeed._

For a long moment they do little more than look, each of them riddles to the other now. Marking all the ways he’s changed is the easy part of it, seeing how time and silence and solitude have made him lean and a little pale, but also clear-eyed. Not so haunted anymore.

Finding out what hasn’t changed, though, will take a little more work. To say nothing of what he sees when he looks at her now; that’s anybody’s guess.

“It’s good to see you, Cormag.” It feels like years before she finds her voice again—but she manages it, in the end. That she’s gotten good at managing is the first thing she wants him to know.

“Well met, Princess,” he answers. His gaze is steady, his voice warm. “I’ve been waiting a long time.”

One thing that hasn’t changed, then: he won’t tell her outright that he’s tired of being alone. Still stubborn, and proud, and slow to laugh. But he still faces her eye to eye, and smiles as he extends his hand for her wet cloak, and that feels like victory—she feels the joy of it blooming in the pit of her chest, and then on her lips, and then in the air, and she’s laughing, laughing over the sound of the rain. 

“Then you shouldn’t have hidden yourself so well.”

**Author's Note:**

> ~~did cormag settle in carcino because glen died there i’m not saying he did but also~~
> 
> Tana's song is "The Wild Rover", a song of unknown origin that's best known as an Irish drinking song, and has a place here because the headcanon that she loves bawdy tavern songs is a dear one to me. :') If you'd like to give it a listen, I very much enjoy [this version.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jgd07Ica5s)


End file.
